#compulsory able-bodiedness

[crippleprophet]

A crip eye for the normate guy, I propose, would not just be a disability version of the Bravo hit, no matter how much pleasure imagining such a show has given me: “Sweetie, your university is an accessibility nightmare! Don’t worry, honey, it is your lucky day that disabled folks are here to tell you just what’s wrong with this place!” Rather, a crip eye for the normate guy (and because we’re talking about not a real person but a subject position, somehow “normate guy” seems appropriate, regardless of whether he rears his able-bodied head in men or women) would mark a critically disabled capacity for recognizing and withstanding the vicissitudes of compulsory able-bodiedness.

Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability

[itmightrain]

Berube's excavation of this subtext pinpoints an important common experience that links all people with disabilities under a system of compulsory able-bodiedness--the experience of the able-bodied need for an agreed-on common ground. I can imagine that answers might be incredibly varied to similar questions: "In the end, wouldn't you rather be hearing?" and "In the end, wouldn't you rather not be HIV positive?" would seem, after all, to be very different questions, the first (with its thinly veiled desire for Deafness not to exist) more obviously genocidal than the second. But they are not really different questions, in that their constant repetition (or their presence as ongoing subtexts) reveals more about the able-bodied culture doing the asking than about the bodies being interrogated. The culture asking such questions assumes in advance that we all agree: able-bodied identities, able-bodied perspectives are preferable and what we all, collectively, are aiming for. A system of compulsory able-bodiedness repeatedly demands that people with disabilities embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken question, "Yes, but in the end, wouldn't you rather be more like me?"

Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability

[identitty-dickruption]

Passing as nondisabled complicates ethnic and queer studies’ analyses of how this seductive but psychically estranging access to privilege operates. Some of my friends, for example, have measured their regard for me by saying, “But I don’t think of you as disabled.” What they point to in such a compliment is the contradiction they find between their perception of me as a valuable, capable, loveable person and the cultural figure of the disabled person whom they take to be precisely my opposite: worthless, incapable, and unlovable. People with disabilities routinely announce that they do not consider themselves as disabled. Although they are often repudiating the literal meaning of the word disabled, their words nevertheless serve to disassociate them from the identity group of the disabled. Our culture offers profound disincentives and few rewards to identifying as disabled. The trouble with such statements is that they leave intact, without challenge, the oppressive stereotypes that permit, among other things, the unexamined use of disability terms such as crippled, lame, dumb, idiot, and moron as verbal gestures of derision. The refusal to claim disability identity is in part due to a lack of ways to understand or talk about disability that are not oppressive

Garland-Thomson (2008), Integrating Disability Transforming Feminist Theory

[fka-thehomosuperior]

Compulsory able-bodiedness, which in a sense produces disability, is thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness: that, in fact, compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness, and vice versa.

Robert McRuer, Introduction: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Experience from Crip Teory (2004)